Skylark

by Dezso Kosztolányi

“How will we bear it?” said the woman in the narrow hallway, tears already welling in her eyes.

  “We'll manage,” Father replied.

  “Friday, Saturday, Sunday,” the woman mumbled, as if telling her beads, “then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday–” here she paused to sigh–“then Friday. A week. A whole week, Father. Whatever will we do without her?'

  Ákos made no reply. He never spoke much, but felt and thought all the more.

  As the woman went on crying, however, he felt obliged to break his silence.

  “Come on now, let's not cry. Today's Friday. Friday's tears are Sunday's laughter. And we'll laugh too, Mother, just you see,” he said without a trace of conviction, and disappeared into the dining room.

  There stood the table in the bright afternoon sunlight, still covered with the greasy plates, glasses and crumbs left over from lunch. At any other time Skylark would have smartly swept the crumbs away with her little dustpan and brush. But even now, how considerate she had been. Before leaving she had straightened the chairs in the drawing room, made the beds, placed two glasses of water on her parents’ bedside table and set nightlight and matches on the old cabinet beside the gold carriage clock for them to light when it got dark.

  Mother began tidying her daughter's bedroom. Ákos, unable to settle, gazed vacantly in through the door.

  The room had once looked like a chapel, chaste and white.

  But the paintwork had faded with time and the silk cushions had grown soiled and a little grey. In the cupboard stood empty cosmetic jars, prayer books from which the lace trimmings of devotional pictures protruded with German inscriptions, velvet-bound, ornamental keepsake albums, fans scribbled thick with names, ball programmes, perfume sachets and hair-pieces hanging from a length of string.

  Beside the door in the darkest corner of the room, facing north, hung Skylark's mirror.

  Everything was engulfed in silence.

  “How empty it all seems,” sighed Mother, gesturing with an open hand.

  Ákos did not know what to say. As if, over the long years of their marriage, he had lost the power to initiate conversation, he simply repeated:

  “How empty.”

  They went back into the dining room.

  There on the sideboard sparkled their treasures–“Souvenirs of Lake Velence,” “Souvenirs of Lake Balaton,” “Glasses from Karlsbad'–accumulated over many years and preserved with unconscious piety. All kinds of other odds and ends glittered alongside them, worthless merchandise now utterly useless and inappropriate: fancy bazaar jugs, tiny china dogs, silver-plated goblets, gold-plated angels, all the ghastly icons of provincial life, dusted every day and assembled on small shelves in rows above the back of the sofa. They trembled when anyone sat down, and toppled on to the chest of anyone who unsuspectingly lay down on the sofa beneath them. And then the pictures; how painfully they too stared back at the old couple now. Dobozy, the Hungarian hero, fleeing from the Turks, clasping his wife around her naked breast; the first Hungarian cabinet; and the baldheaded Batthyány, down on his knees with his arms flung wide, waiting for the murderous bullet of his Austrian executioners.

  “Let's go into the garden,” the woman proposed.

  “Yes, the garden,” echoed Ákos.

  They went into the garden. Sweltering, yellow heat greeted them outside. Delicate white kittens pranced across the emerald lawn. A large bowl of water stood beside the well, the sunlight making the colours of the rainbow through the glasses inside. A sunflower on a crooked stem lifted its sun-worshipping head to the blazing west. Horse-chestnut trees, acacias and sumachs rose up behind. And still farther back, by the garden wall, a Virginia pokeweed showed off its dark, ripe berries.

  On Skylark's crochet bench they sat down side by side.

  “Poor thing,” said Mother, “at least it'll be a rest. And perhaps...” She did not continue.

  “Perhaps what?'

  “Perhaps someone might...turn up.”

  “What kind of someone?'

  “Someone,” Mother repeated timidly, “some...good fortune,” she added with an affecting, womanly boldness.

  Father looked away in irritation, ashamed to hear what he had so often heard in vain, had so often thought himself, yet knew would only ever lead to more humiliating fiascos and bitter disappointments. There was something vulgar about his wife's remark. He shrugged. Then, almost inaudibly, he muttered:

  “Absurd.”

  He reached for his pocket watch.

  “What time did he say?” he asked.

  “Who?'

  “Him,” the old man barked, and his wife immediately knew he was referring to Géza Cifra.

  “Five twenty.”

  “It's half past five,” said Father. “She'll have just got in.”

  The thought consoled them both a little. They rose from the bench and strolled among the lilac bushes where a stone dwarf stood on guard. At about this time they usually set off on their walks with Skylark, through the empty streets to the calvary cross and back. But not today. They walked around the garden several times, side by side, their pace quickening as they went. Ákos hoped the horses hadn't bolted on the plain and that Tiger hadn't bitten the girl. Mother ambled along beside him, sharing, and thus lightening, the burden of his thoughts. It felt as if that awful week–a week they'd have to spend alone–had already begun badly, very badly indeed. It all seemed so endless, hopeless and bleak.

  Skylark had promised to wire home the moment she arrived. They had written out the message in advance, so all she had to do was send it off. All it said was:

  “Arrived safely.”

  Dusk fell slowly. For a while they waited for the postman out in the garden, but unable to settle they went inside, believing this would somehow speed the telegram's arrival.

  Hours went by and still it hadn't come.

  Ákos shut all the doors. As every evening, he checked behind the furniture and the clothes in the wardrobes to see if anyone was hiding there. At nine, when he would usually retire, he went into the bedroom with his wife and lay down on the bed, still fully dressed.

  Thoroughly worn out, he fell asleep.

  In his dreams he was again walking down Széchenyi Street with Skylark and his wife.

  But now they deviated from their usual route and turned into a less familiar road, taking them under a tunnel and, through seemingly endless back streets, into a kind of timber yard.

  Here he suddenly noticed that his daughter was missing. He looked at his wife, whose face at once confirmed his terrible premonitions. The woman's face did not merely suggest the girl had disappeared, but that she had been kidnapped. He had already seen her kidnappers several times, mysterious characters dressed partly like medieval knights in armour and partly like clowns in black face masks.

  Ákos started to run ahead towards the timber yard, then, suddenly alarmed to find himself alone, ran back again. For a moment he thought he had seen her. Beside a wooden fence that reminded him of his own, Skylark, like a quiet madwoman, lifted her slanted, imploring gaze towards him and, reaching out with her hands, cried for help. She appeared to be trapped. Ákos was just about to reach out to her when she disappeared.

  After that he searched for her in vain. He rattled gates, inquired at inns, even entered one suspicious-looking house, a kind of suburban brothel, where ugly strumpets cackled at him before turning on him with their fists. Finally he found himself in a strange workshop at the bottom of a flight of steps, deep beneath the ground.

  Here in a green apron squatted an artisan, not Mr Veres, but a sly and shifty individual in a regulation cap with a tin number. He clearly knew all there was to know, and, without even looking at Ákos, pointed with conspiratorial indifference to a curtained glass door. Ákos charged through it and, in a dim alcove, finally found his daughter. Skylark lay on the ground, her head shaven, her body horribly mutilated, stab wounds in her naked breast. She was dead.

  The old woman quietly pottered about the room, careful not
to wake her husband. She could hear his irregular breathing–the sort that often heralds a sleeping cry–and watched his restless head turn on the pillow. Her husband's first sleep tended to be night-marish, and he'd often spring up in bed with an animal howl.

  She went over to him, bent down and lightly touched his brow.

  Ákos sat up. He took a sip of water.

  He kept his eyes wide open.

  He could still see before him the figures from his dream, whom he had encountered so many times before. But even now it staggered him that his precious daughter, who, poor thing, lived such a quiet life, could be the focus of such a horrific and dramatic dream.

  After these nightmares he would love Skylark still more dearly.

  His wife spoke of the telegram.

  “Still nothing?” asked Ákos.

  “Not yet.”

  At this the bell buzzed in the kitchen. The woman sprang up and ran to open the door.

  “It's here,” she cried, hurrying back.

  “Arrived safely.”

  She read it aloud.

  Ákos took it into his hands and gazed at it with happy, unbelieving eyes.

  “Arrived safely.”

  He, too, read it out loud.

  Fully reassured and smiling at their earlier fears, they undressed, put out the light and both dozed off to sleep.

  And high time too; it was already after midnight.

  IV

  in which some of the more notable figures of Sárszeg appear before us in the King of Hungary, one Bálint Környey among them

  On Saturday the town was flooded with people from the surrounding farms. Saturday was market day.

  It was still dark when the first women arrived. Rattling down the unpaved streets in their carts, they dragged a train of dust behind them. First they fed their brood of bawling infants who bounced among the kohlrabi in the depths of their wicker-ribbed wagons. Pulling flat milk bottles from their boots, the teats already swarming black with flies, they pressed them into the tiny mouths of their hungry offspring, who greedily gulped down the warm, sour milk.

  Some time later the peasants from Kék strolled in. They congregated around the gossips’ bench on Széchenyi Square and, with squat clay pipes jutting from their fanglike teeth, they rambled on about rinderpest and rising taxes. Beside them, in a separate group, stood the local artisans and tradesmen, complaining about the shortage of cash, which couldn't be raised anywhere these days, because their lordships were playing it safe and kept their money in the Agricultural Bank at 5 per cent interest.

  The market seethed in the sweltering heat, humming with noise and ablaze with every imaginable colour. Red peppers shone as brightly as the florid scarlet paint in the paint-shop window across the square. Cabbages displayed their pale-green, silken frills, violet grapes glistened, marrows whitened in the sun, and yellowing melons, already past their best, gave off a sickly choleroid stench. Farther off, towards Petőfi Street, stood the butchers’ stalls where truncated carcasses swung with raw, barbaric pomp from iron hooks, and barrel-chested butchers’ boys in skimpy vests shattered bones with heavy mallets. From Bólyai Street, where the potters gathered, came the clatter of the crockery stalls. Everywhere poultry pecked, maids gossiped and gentlewomen moaned about impossible prices. Above them all stretched a veil of silvery grey dust, Sárszeg's murderous dust which robbed so many local children of their lives and brought the adults to an early death.

  Miklós Ijas, assistant editor of the Sárszeg Gazette at barely twenty-four, viewed this scene through the plate-glass windows of the Széchenyi Café. He wore a modish English suit, a turned-down collar and a slender lilac necktie.

  He had woken at half past nine and immediately hurried to the Café to read the Budapest papers. Although he'd had no breakfast, he ordered rum with his black coffee and lit one cigarette after another. His lip curled with disgust.

  He saw this same scene every day. The celebrities of Sárszeg swam past his plate-glass window as if in an aquarium.

  First came Galló, the prosecutor, on his way to court, bareheaded, with a flat brown briefcase in his hand. With a furrowed brow and an affable smile he was rehearsing a stern indictment speech against some heinous Swabian highwayman. Fashionable townsfolk passed slowly by with ivory-knobbed canes. Priboczay was already standing in the doorway of the St Mary Pharmacy, performing his daily manicure with a penknife. Feri Füzes was hurrying towards the Gentlemen's Club.

  Feri Füzes was to meet the opponent's seconds in the club dining room so that statements could be drawn up and the thorny affair, which had been dragging on for weeks, could finally be settled, for better or worse, according to the proper protocol. Provocation, duel, court of honour, sabres, plastrons, five paces forward, to the finish–these were the words that buzzed through Feri Füzes's head as his pointed patent-leather shoes creaked their way across the asphalt.

  It was he who patched up Sárszeg's wounded prides and damaged honours; the perfect gentleman, a regular cavalier. He exuded eau de cologne and cavorted about with a foolish, sickly grin that never left his lips. He wore his smile just as he wore his chic boater in summer or his fancy spats in winter.

  County carriages flew by. Liverymen sat up on the boxes in dapper blue and white-piped uniforms, their hat ribbons fluttering in the wind. Then the burly figure of a gentleman with a bushy, yellow moustache appeared on the pavement of Széchenyi Street. Bálint Környey.

  By profession, Bálint Környey was commander in chief of the local fire brigade. But in reality he occupied a far more elevated position in Sárszeg society. He was everybody's friend or acquaintance and turned up absolutely everywhere. President of the Panthers’ Table, fabled drinker, fêted sportsman, he could break a silver forint coin in two with his bare hands. It was he who set the prizes for the Sárszeg Student Games, and he who organised the Grand Venetian Night with floodlights and fireworks on Tarliget Lake each summer. Even now the billboards were still plastered with tattered flyers announcing this splendid July event to the citizens of Sárszeg.

  He greeted the young editor with a wave of his stick. Ijas returned the greeting coolly. To local people he was just an editor; they had no idea what a poet he was.

  The clocks had struck eleven in Petőfi Street and still all was silent. Even Mr Veres sensed this silence from the depths of his dark, insalubrious workshop. The Vajkays usually rose on the dot of seven. Skylark would open all the windows, airing and cleaning the rooms inside.

  Today the old couple had overslept. The nightlight still flickered beside the carriage clock.

  When they first opened their eyes it was already twenty to twelve. They were surprised to find themselves alone. For a moment they pricked up their ears, but no sound came from their daughter's room next door. The anxieties of the previous day still hung heavy on their hearts, and as they woke they lived the whole day over again.

  But another, no less painful sensation now presented itself besides. Their stomachs began to rumble: a loud, hollow sound, silencing all other complaints and demanding their undivided attention.

  While they slept, dreams had provided illusory nourishment, smothering their hunger with thick and coloured veils. But no sooner had they dressed than they could feel their emptiness, and pressed their palms against their burning stomachs.

  “I'm starving,” said father.

  “Me too,” said Mother.

  And they laughed at their own frailty.

  No wonder they were famished. They had forgotten supper the evening before and had only pecked hurriedly at lunch. Such meals are never filling.

  “Quickly, tea.”

  “Yes, tea.”

  Mother went into the kitchen to make tea.

  The Vajkays didn't keep a maid. Skylark's nanny, Örzse, a liveryman's daughter, who had been with them since the age of twenty, had left them six years before. Since then they had taken on the odd girl here and there, but these never stayed more than a couple of weeks. Skylark was so strict, keeping everythin
g locked away, especially the sugar, and so demanding that the maids all fled before their time was up. They didn't want a new girl in their home now; after all, they had to be careful with money, had to count every penny. Besides, the girls all stole and gossiped nowadays. And anyway, what could a maid do that they could not? Skylark and her mother did everything themselves, and better too. Cleaning was a joy, and as for cooking, they loved nothing more. They were always boiling or baking something.

  Mother and Father drank their tea. But this did not stave off their hunger. It merely cleansed their stomachs, increasing the emptiness. Their thoughts turned at once to lunch.

  Already some weeks earlier it had been agreed that, for these few days–it was only a week, after all–they wouldn't cook at home. Skylark, who presided in all culinary matters, recommended the King of Hungary, Sárszeg's largest restaurant, as the one place where the cuisine was still tolerable.

  The three of them detested restaurants. And although they had hardly visited this one, they could talk about it for hours with sneering condescension. The dishwater soups, the tough and gristly meat, the carelessly concocted desserts they served up to poor, unsuspecting bachelors, who had never tasted good home cooking. Not to mention the disgusting state of the kitchens. Oh, for a home-made soup, a homemade stew, or a home-baked pastry! They had often expressed such sentiments to Géza Cifra.

  Somehow they had to overcome the disgust they had artificially cultivated beyond all proportion. On the way to the restaurant they comforted each other, braving themselves for the dubious event. When they stepped inside the King of Hungary they immediately wrinkled their noses and screwed up their eyes. An enormous, clean and friendly dining hall stretched out before them, with a ceiling of frosted glass, lit, even by day, by four weighty chandeliers.

  Ákos led his wife to a table and sat down.

  In the middle of the impeccably laundered tablecloth stood a bunch of flowers. Beside it were two small silver dishes freshly heaped with salt and paprika, a pepper pot and jars of mustard, vinegar and oil. To one side, on a splendid glass platter with a silver rim, lay apples, peaches and, in little wicker baskets, fresh and crusty rolls, salted croissants and small white loaves sprinkled with poppy seeds. Just then two pastry boys came through the door in bright white caps, carrying a long wooden board packed with a battalion of vanilla slices, whose rich egg fillings shone a gorgeous gold beneath their crumbling red-brown pastry crusts, sprinkled thick with icing sugar. The old man stole a fleeting glance at these delights with a certain vague contempt. He picked up the menu, then handed it to his wife.